What matters in a way is
not just the sign or the symbol, but also all the reverberating uncapturable
energies that the sign or the symbol alludes to. The residues of speaking
and signaling. It's not, as Benjamin notes, "what the moving red neon sign says - but the fiery red pool reflecting it in the
asphalt." -" Tom Jacobs, "On Clues, Screws, and the True" (http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/01/clues.html#more)

I was not entirely surprised when I read this morning that
according to a CBS poll 57% of the American
people don't believe there is a connection between the vitriolic rhetoric that
dominates politics and the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 19
other people in Tucson, Arizona.
The poll showed some differences along party lines, but that isn't what
is important. What is important is
that opinion polls consistently show that most Americans believe a lot of nutty
things, including, but not limited to, that our diets
are healthy, that creationism provides a
better explanation for life on earth than does evolution, that the government
is keeping aliens and knowledge of aliens
under wraps, and that Fox is the most trusted name in news.

Most Americans also don't believe that college professors
like me can offer students anything other than indoctrination to our leftist
ways. So why are you bothering to
read this column? According to the
vitriolic rhetoric of folks like Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Rush
Limbaugh, and so on, because I am a college professor everything I say is
suspect.

Of course there is no real link between what those
commentators on the right say and what you believe, right? And certainly no tie between what they
say and anything that happens in the world, good or bad, right?

Here's the rub, ladies and gentleman. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say, as the right does, that
because a young man has a copy of a book written by Karl Marx on his shelf at
home that he is a leftist and then turn right around and claim that there is no
link between what words are used to create an idea, or an ideology, and the
resulting behavior of people who listen to them and treat them as true.

Think about it.
What do you believe?
Why? Let's ramp it up a
bit: Why do you behave as you do?
Is it motivated by what you believe? By what others tell you? By the master narratives that guide your understanding of
America, of what is right and wrong, of what history teaches us, and what we
have learned about ourselves from science? How about your sense of how the world works and your place
in it? Where do those ideas come from? Because surely they come from
somewhere. And they are expressed
in language, in words, that have meaning for you. Particular meaning.

The answer to the big question of why we behave the way we
do was provided by two social scientists, Professors Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs, a long time
ago. Their answer: Because we think we should behave
that way . To wit: "All
behavior is rational at the time of the behavior to the behaver." It's really that simple.

So the question of why Loughner shot 20 people at the
Safeway Plaza in Tucson is not a mystery.
He shot those unfortunate human beings, killing six of them, because he
believed it was the right thing to do.
He was clearly insane, yes, but in his head he was just doing what he
felt he needed to do, and, because of what he believed, he was doing what he
thought was right.

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That is admittedly a very scary thought. It is even a scarier thought--at least
to me, given what I believe in--that a person with a long history of mental
illness who had failed a drug test to get into military service was nevertheless
allowed to purchase a Glock 19 with an extended magazine capable of holding 30
bullets. But that's just me. I'm crazy like that. Probably because of what I read. Or listen to. Or think about.

My point is that regardless of an opinion poll that severely
tests the intelligence of the average American to think much beyond what they
get from their most trusted news source on the left or the right, those of us
in the communication field who have spent years studying hate speech,
revolutionary rhetoric, and extremist violence have a pretty fair Snygg &
Combs-type of understanding of the relationship among those terms. It can be summarized in the words of an
18th century clergyman named George
Campbell in his book, The Philosophy of Rhetoric :
"Rhetoric appeals to the imagination for the better moving of the will."

Campbell was interested in finding better ways of using the
newly created field of faculty psychology to train Presbyterian ministers to do
a better job of leading their flocks to Jesus. One of his contributions to the study and practice of
rhetoric was the critique of Aristotle's belief that humans are rational
animals. Campbell believed that in
fact Aristotle had replaced a wish for reality, and that in reality humans are
far more easily motivated by their emotions than by reasoning.

This notion, of course, is still true today. In fact, so powerful are rhetorical
appeals to human emotions even without good reasons or a firm truth behind them
that we invest billions each year in new ways to perpetrate it. It is called advertising, marketing,
propaganda, and (in some cases) public relations. If you, my friend, have ever bought a product hoping it
would bring you youth, beauty, riches, world peace, or weight loss; if you have
ever purchased a car because you thought it "said something" about you; if you
have ever voted for a candidate because they promised you the American Dream
-"ah, but let's not go there.
Right? Because according to
that pesky opinion poll, you don't believe in such things as words are made
of. Which means, I guess, that you
also never hoped that someone would say she or he loved you.

But I digress.
If only a little bit.

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Words are symbols and as such they are representations of
reality. But that doesn't mean, as
Kenneth Burke teaches us, that we don't act as
if the realities they represent are real or that we shouldn't act one way or
the other because of them. Words
are symbolic actions , they create the
drama that we call the stage of everyday life.

There is a fascinating take on "stochastic terrorism," or
the relationship of words that come with a symbolic license to kill and the
real attempts (some successful) to take human lives, that I recommend to
you. The author, identified only
as G2geek, writes:

"Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up
random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically
predictable but individually unpredictable.

H. L. (Bud) Goodall, Jr. lives in Arizona where he is a college professor and writer. He has published 20 books and many articles and chapters on a variety of communication issues. His most recent books include Counter-Narrative: How Progressive (more...)